Point of View

The Hate Race is Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir. Thus, she has written the text from her first-person point of view. In using her first-person perspective, Clarke is claiming her experiences and telling her story in her own words and using her own voice.

In Chapter 1, Clarke directly addresses her approach to storytelling throughout the memoir, saying: “There’s that folklore way West indians have, of weaving a tale: facts just so, gasps and guffaws in all the right places—because, after all, what else is a story for” (3)? She does acknowledge that there are “myriad ways of telling” her account and that the “margins between events have blended and shifted in the tell of it” (3, Clarke’s italics). These admissions reveal Clarke’s humility and vulnerability. She is owning the complexities of relaying her account while simultaneously declaring that this is her story and...